Inside Health

A CONVERSATION WITH/Kenneth Kamler; Bringing Them Back, Healthy, From the Ends of the Earth

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS

Published: June 22, 2004

Kenneth Kamler, 56, is a man with a double life. For much of the year, he labors as a Long Island-based microsurgeon, specializing in hand reconstruction and finger reattachment. In his other guise, Dr. Kamler is an eminent adventure physician, a staff doctor with scientific expeditions journeying to remote corners to investigate how crocodiles mate or how NASA's medical equipment works at high altitudes. He is a vice president of the prestigious Explorers Club in New York.

As part of his second specialty, Dr. Kamler has been to Mount Everest six times and was on the mountain in 1996 when eight mountaineers died, a disaster chronicled in Jon Krakauer's book ''Into Thin Air.'' Dr. Kamler provided emergency treatment to the survivors.

''When I first began doing this, I worried that my medical colleagues would look at me as flaky,'' he said in a recent interview to promote his new book, ''Surviving the Extremes.'' ''A hand surgeon depends on other doctors for referrals. But this has actually made me more popular in the medical community. Whenever I come back from a trip, all my colleagues want to hear about my adventures.''

Q. Did you grow up wanting to be Shackleton or Amundsen?

A. Well, even as a kid in the Bronx, I wanted an adventurous life. I didn't really act on that until around 1980, when I was already in my 30's. I'd signed up for a mountaineering course in New Hampshire. The guy who taught me was an ex-Green Beret from North Dakota. I didn't think we'd have anything in common, but we really hit it off. Afterward, he told me about a climbing expedition he was taking to Peru. They needed a doctor. Did I want to go? That was the beginning.

Q. You are a hand surgeon. How did you develop the skills needed to become an adventure physician?

A. You teach yourself. You read what you can and put that together with your own basic understanding of medicine. Nowadays, you can take courses in wilderness medicine, which is similar. But when I first started going on expeditions in the early 1980's, there wasn't much.

Before that first trip to Peru, I made a list of all the likely health emergencies we might encounter there. Then I looked up the various treatments and packed supplies for them. I wrote everything down on little slips of paper, like little Buddhist prayers, and kept them in my pockets just in case. Some of this stuff I hadn't done since I was an intern; some of it, I'd never done. The basic thing with adventure medicine or extreme medicine is that you are going to places where humans don't belong and people will certainly get into trouble.

When I went to Amazonia, l went as the field doctor for biologists studying crocodile behavior. There's no way humans should have any encounters with crocodiles. You should stay away from them! There was no manual to consult about this. So before I went on that expedition, I sat down and made a list again. The biggest risk, I expected, was getting mauled by a crocodile, but also electric eel stings, piranha bites, poison frogs and parasites.

Q. Once in the Amazon, were you surprised by anything?

A. No one in our group got bitten by a crocodile, which was surprising!

But there were tunga fleas. These are little creatures that jumped up on your skin when you went to the latrine and embedded themselves in your rear end. You had to extract them very carefully. I brought along insect repellents, and they didn't really work. The bugs seemed to feed on the stuff. The more you put on, the more they attacked you. Antonio, one of the Indians who went out with us, he took material from termite nests and rubbed it on his body. That was far more effective.

Q. Why do expeditions need a staff doctor?

A. Because most involve taking people into strange environments. There's a reason why people don't generally live in the places where explorers go. Humans exist within a real narrow range, and when people go beyond it, their bodies are not designed for it, and they may get into trouble.

Q. Speaking of hostile environments, you've been to Mount Everest six times. What exactly does a doctor do on the world's tallest mountain?

A. No.1, I take care of the climbers in my group. I've been there as the staff doctor for four National Geographic expeditions and two from NASA. Base camp on Everest is at 17,500 feet, higher than any point in the contiguous United States. You can get life-threatening illnesses at that level. So you get people to the mountain in the healthiest way possible. You can't just helicopter people from near sea level to that altitude and then expect them to start climbing. They'll die if you try to do that.

My second job is to monitor the other climbers and interpret their health data as they go up the mountain. If something bad is happening, it's up to me to call them back. You really have to be cautious when you go up there. People can die on a mountain. Every time I've been on Everest, people have died, though not in any expedition I was part of.

Q. You were on Mount Everest as the same time as the ''Into Thin Air'' expedition. Do you agree with the author Jon Krakauer that those deaths were preventable?